Vivint $$$ for research: Will you vote every day you can?

Yes

No

SpecialK82 spotted a new contest run by Vivint in which ME/CFS research charities could win up to $650,000 - possibly $250,000 for the WPI.

It involves voting daily and you need a Facebook account. At the moment we're in Phase 1, which involves getting charities into the top 20 in their local region (there are five regions), until 11 June. When Phase 2 starts on 14 June, we'll have nearly 11 weeks of daily voting to bring in cash! Only the top charity in each region will win (no second, third, fourth) and we'll need every vote.

It would be a big help to know how many people are voting at this stage so that we know if we can get a few more ME/CFS charities into their region's top 20. If we can, they are eligible to have up to $2,500 each in matching funds from Vivint if people donate money to them.

I expect that we'll keep bumping the Vivint thread, like we are now - so if you check PR using the "What's New" button you'll see it. There's also someone on Facebook sending out daily reminders to vote for WPI - the link is on the main Vivint thread.

For a group to win overall, we'd ideally need a few more of them. It is definitely feasible that the WPI would be a regional winner ($100,000) and/or an overall winner ($250,000); also it could be feasible for the National ME/FM Action Network to be a regional winner ($100,000). This is in Round 2 - voting for that starts on June 14.

My hope is that we'd be getting a substantial fraction of 700 votes a day just from Phoenix Rising because that's how many people visit the site daily - but I suspect most of them haven't noticed the poll! I think we need to just keep on and on about the contest!

Voting for Round 2 started today. I think only really the Whittemore Peterson Institute and maybe the National ME/FM Action Network have a chance of winning their region (i.e. voting for a group that doesn't have a chance of winning its region is a waste, in my opinion).